In a video published today by Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts – Google confirmed that they do not penalize sites that have broken or invalid HTML.
Matt Cutts said, “so Google does not penalize you if you have invalid HTML, because there would be a huge number of web pages like that.”
Cutts went on to explain that if they did use the validity of HTML as a ranking signal, it would currently hurt search quality. Why? Because there are too many web pages that have invalid HTML and thus good content would not rank as well if this was a signal.
Matt Cutts did add that Google reserves the right to use this as a ranking factor in the future but right now, it is not.
He also adds that there may be a correlation between better ranking web pages and valid HTML but it is still not a ranking factor.
Here is the video:
More From Google’s Matt Cutts:
- Video: Google’s Matt Cutts On Advertorials & Webmaster Guidelines
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- Google: Guest Blogging For Links? You Better Nofollow Those Links
- Matt Cutts On Penalties Vs. Algorithm Changes, A Disavow-This-Link Tool & More
- Google’s Matt Cutts: Linking 20 Domains Together Likely A “Cross Linking Scheme”
